Breastfeeding and breast cancer

By : Eyal Cohen

Many young women are grappling with the question of whether to breastfeed their babies, especially when different manufacturers guarantee that they produce formulas which are the closest to Mother’s milk, and the mothers can free themselves from the trouble of breastfeeding.

As I see it, this dilema started early in the 1970s, when research (probably initiated and financed generously by the baby formula industry) determined that breastfeeding caused women’s breasts to shrivel and lose their shape. As expected, horrified by the findings, young mothers, wanting to keep their attractive appearance and preserve their young and sexy look, rejected breastfeeding and turned to feeding their babies with formulas.
Even if those formulas contain all the nutritional ingredients that the baby needs, using these formulas ignores the tremendous significance of the energy component in natural mother’s milk that stimulates her baby’s proper healthy growth and development. The energy in mother’s milk also has great significance in the mother/baby connection and relationship.

From all the researches and the studies that have been done so far, we know that there is no subtitute for the mother’s milk, and you may think that babies are paying the price, but you might also presume that as a result of this immoral behavior, the mothers also pay a price.
Ironically, the exact opposite of that research is true: just as with any other body organ, the more the breast is used for its natural purposes, the stronger it gets, and the more developed it will become.

A woman’s breast was primarily designed for feeding babies, and only secondarily is it used as a beauty or sexual accessory. By preventing a body organ from doing its natural job, we challenge it with life’s basic rule: “use it or lose it.” The less an organ is used for its purpose, it is more susceptible to atrophy: as the blood supply to it decreases, it will shrink, shrivel, and be more susceptible to disease.

I personally believe that there is a definite connection between the decline in breastfeeding and the sharp rise in breast cancer, since the atrophy that impairs the blood flow in the breasts also lowers the immune system’s ability to identify and destroy cancer cells.

The sharp rise in the breast cancer shows that it is more than likely that those sponsored studies did their job beyond all expectation, and in the wild race to maximize profits by promoting baby formula, they damaged generations of babies as well as their mothers.